


On Lonely Magicians and the Concept of Love

by Anonymous



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 21:05:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12141117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: In which two magicians can pull everything out of thin air except courage, and make everything disappear except love.





	On Lonely Magicians and the Concept of Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyone/gifts).



It is strange that love is perceived as the greatest gift of life, Jongin thinks, because it is really more like an incurable Stockholm syndrome that develops with the same unpredictable, split-second onset of falling asleep. Not something to be grateful for at all.

It has been a year since Kyungsoo disappeared, yet Jongin is still returning to the old alley where they first spoke so long ago. Not looking for him and not waiting. Just bound, perhaps, to the rusting metal dumpsters, or to tracing the cracks creeping down the concrete walls, or to counting the brick shingles, or to watching the moon sit on the roof above the dead end, fading, as all things do, into the sunrise.

For the fourth time this week, Jongin stands at the mouth of the alley, heels lined up with the crumbling edges of the sidewalk, staring into it. It’s empty. A light breeze brushes over his neck. Holding his breath, he takes a few steps forward and toes the littered asphalt between the buildings.

The alley breathes.

Jongin hears the yellowed autumn leaves scraping against the ground before he sees them swirling up around his feet. His heart lunges into his throat and he chokes on it, and then he feels nothing. The crisp air now smells of dirt and cologne. He walks forward, the flurry of leaves moving with him, then stops a few meters from the dead end, halfway between shadow and moonlight.

Footsteps beside him. Light bends. The click of dress shoes against concrete slows to a stop, perfectly aligned with Jongin, between light and dark. The echo seems to crumble with the walls. A pebble bounces over the ground. When Jongin glances to the side, he sees the shadow of someone lighting a cigarette. Smells it burning. Jongin wrinkles his nose, and the shadow pulls the cigarette away from its lips. As it exhales, Kyungsoo drifts in with the smoke, slipping out of the air the way regret slips out of nostalgia.

“Nice to see you again, Kim Jongin.” The corner of his lips opposite the cigarette curves steeply into a smirk.

Jongin blinks. _Is that all?_

♖

“Is that all?” Jongin had asked three years ago, staring up at Kyungsoo from where he sat alone in Kyungsoo’s home theater. “Is that all you’re going to show me today?”

Kyungsoo quirked an eyebrow and pulled off his white satin gloves, tucking them into the right pocket of his double breasted jacket. Jongin stared at him expectantly, half-hoping they’d fly out of his pocket again like that paper dove trick Kyungsoo used to close his shows with. It was one of Jongin’s favorites: Kyungsoo would twirl his hand and snap his fingers and the origami doves he’d sent flying above the stage would freeze and fall suddenly to the ground, like God had slammed on all their brakes. Perhaps that’s why Jongin liked it—it was proof that a higher being existed, and it was proof that the higher being was Kyungsoo.

In any case, the gloves didn’t come flying back out of Kyungsoo’s pocket. Instead, Kyungsoo mimicked his stare, looking back at Jongin with wide, childlike eyes. It was a wonder how he could seem so mysterious with eyes like that. They stared at each other for what might have been several minutes. One corner of Kyungsoo’s lip twitched upward and Jongin abruptly leaned forward with anticipation—he must have been about to show Jongin something new—and on the skip of the next heartbeat, Kyungsoo vanished, soundlessly.

Jongin instinctively leapt out of his seat, reaching out to grab the air where Kyungsoo had been as though he would be able to pull him back out. In that moment he felt the edge of the wooden stage come in contact with his shin, and in the next, he was in his own bedroom, landing with a quiet thump on his mattress. Outside his window, a raven pecked at the glass. Whenever it wasn’t pecking, it turned the side of its head towards him so that one of its black, hemispherical eyes was staring right at him.

Huffing quietly, he pulled a chair up at the window, propped his elbows on the ledge, and stared at the bird until it flew away into the evening.

♜

“I was hoping,” Kyungsoo says, then stops to blow smoke from his mouth. He drops the cigarette on the floor and steps on it. “I was hoping that you might greet me a little more enthusiastically. Like you used to.”

Holding his breath, Jongin stares at his feet. “I might have been hoping for the same.”

Kyungsoo snorts, amused. “You know I’ve never been one for sentimentalism.”

Jongin inhales sharply, almost choking on the cold air that slices through his windpipe.

“Ah, well, things were different between us then,” Kyungsoo muses, grinding the cigarette nonchalantly into the concrete. “Maybe you’ve forgotten who I really am.”

“I wish.”

“Ooh. Ouch.” Drawing his foot back to expose the crushed cigarette, Kyungsoo motions with his index finger and it stiffens once more, flying from the ground to the space before his lips. The tip slowly burns red again, and he snatches it with his teeth.

Jongin swallows. His eyes feel too dry to close.

Though Kyungsoo isn’t looking at him, just looking straight ahead, Jongin does his best to make their eyes meet. His lips move and he feels the air scrape through his throat, but nothing comes out. His fingers tremble, and his neck hurts already from trying not to turn away. He tries again.

“Come back, Kyungsoo. I’m sorry.”

For a moment Kyungsoo’s eyes meet his. Jongin thinks he looks afraid or surprised, irises like holes in the glowing whites of his eyes, save for the flickering reflection of cigarette embers. Always so deceptive, Kyungsoo, with those wide eyes of his, the natural arch of his eyebrows. So unreadable. Hidden under so many layers of stoically pursed lips and blank stares that you’d drown trying to peel them all off. 

“Come back.” The words slip past his constricting throat, almost too quiet for him to hear. “Please.”

Kyungsoo laughs. It sounds like his voice is filtering through television static.

“I wish,” he starts, speech oddly stilted as if it hurts each time a word leaves his mouth. “If only you had told me sooner."

♖

Sometimes, on the limousine back home, Kyungsoo would rest his head on Jongin’s shoulder and close his eyes. Jongin knew Kyungsoo wasn’t sleeping because he looked too peaceful. Sometimes, though he was half-aware that Kyungsoo knew what was happening even with his eyes shut, Jongin would lift one hand and slowly inch it towards Kyungsoo’s. He would position his hand right above Kyungsoo’s, fingers trembling as they hovered there, as though time had wrapped around his wrist and held it still.

Perhaps Jongin had been in love with Kyungsoo from the very beginning, from the first show he had attended in the middle of high school. Perhaps the feeling he’d had for Kyungsoo before was not actually love nor the act of falling into it, but an immature infatuation that was bound to be molded by Kyungsoo’s clever hands into the ice-cold, armor-bound love it was now. The feeling that used to make his chest ache with awe now constricted around his useless heart, stripping his love of all the courage and hope, leaving behind what love was without those things—a longing akin to bereavement.

Every time his hand was caught there, he would think, _hold my hand, Kyungsoo. Just hold my hand_. The one day Kyungsoo did, Jongin’s hand got so sweaty that it felt like it was melting and pooling into a sticky warmth on Kyungsoo’s palm. Kyungsoo kept holding it like he didn’t notice. He might have smiled.

After a few minutes, forehead covered in sweat, Jongin had to pull away.

This was what Jongin remembered when he discovered Kyungsoo’s wallet next to a bottle of pinot noir on the nightstand in his hotel room some weeks later. The menu of alcoholic beverages lay open beside it, and Kyungsoo’s Visa card sat neatly beside the bottom right corner. He thought again of the distinct, disturbing sensation of his hand melting into Kyungsoo’s and slipping through Kyungsoo’s delicate fingers, thought of how much he wanted a second chance even if it meant hiding behind the burn of alcohol in his throat, and picked up the phone.

Two hours later he and Kyungsoo were waltzing amidst the empty bottles of cabernet sauvignon and soju and vodka and whiskey. It hurt to smell the sourness of his own breath when he laughed, but it was worth feeling Kyungsoo’s firm grip around his waist or his wrists when he stumbled, hearing Kyungsoo chuckle, or watching Kyungsoo gaze at him with those wide, guarded eyes as he tousled Jongin’s hair with his fingers. Somewhere along the way, Kyungsoo held his hand again, and with a flick of his index finger they were floating three feet above the ground.

Jongin laughed and sat down on the invisible plane they were floating on, pulling Kyungsoo down with him. “Why are you floating, Soosoo?” The words spilled out of his mouth like syrup.

Kyungsoo snorted preemptively at his own joke and said, “You’ve got me feeling pretty high.”

Jongin grinned at Kyungsoo and brought himself up so high that his head was touching the ceiling. Looking down to meet Kyungsoo’s eyes, he waggled his eyebrows. “Maybe you’re feeling a little high,” Jongin giggled, “but you’ve got me on Cloud Nine.” Mustering all the focus he could, he conjured miniature clouds like large cotton balls one by one as he counted to nine, the first one manifesting at Kyungsoo’s eye level, and the last one resting in the same plane that Jongin was sitting.

“That’s not a good joke at all,” Kyungsoo said, shaking his head. “I’m going to bed.”

Clumsily, Jongin launched himself from where he was and tackled Kyungsoo, pinning him down where he was floating with his knees on either side of Kyungsoo’s waist, hands on his shoulders. “Don’t sleep yet, Kyungsoo,” he whispered. His breath was coming short, in part from the exertion of creating the small clouds and in part from the apprehension he felt at what he was about to say, though no matter how terrified he felt at what was about to unfold he wouldn’t and couldn’t stop himself. “I have a secret and you have to listen to me.”

“I was kidding,” he said, and his tone sounded light but his eyes had widened and his hand was moving to cover Jongin’s mouth. “But I think we should—”

“No, Soosoo, listen. I—”

“Shut up.”

Without warning, Kyungsoo pressed his lips against Jongin’s. Jongin could feel the words and their meaning being swallowed out from his mouth into Kyungsoo’s along with the little air that was left in his lungs. All the courage and all the hope, cleaved again from what he had been trying to say. He could feel it sliding down into Kyungsoo’s stomach and evaporating into nothing the way Kyungsoo made himself disappear after a performance. The possible _love you_ , the daring _know you love me, too_ —all of it, as though it had never existed. As Kyungsoo held Jongin’s lips between his own, Jongin was no longer sure that the thoughts had ever been in his mind.

Pulling away, he whispered, voice trembling, “There is a line here, Jongin.”

And then, again, Kyungsoo was gone. Jongin fell onto the carpet. His hand landed on the original bottle of pinot noir. He gripped it by the neck and brought it down as hard as he could on the floor over and over again until it shattered, watching as the glass chipped into shards from bottom to top and broke into his palm, thinking somewhere in a distant part of his mind that Kyungsoo had been doing something like this to himself all along.

♜

Jongin stands in the alley, listening to the wind blow Kyungsoo’s last cracked and whispered words around him in an indecipherable echo.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, but Kyungsoo and his echo have disappeared, and the leaves that were swirling around him settle to the ground in cold ashes.

♖

A month later, Jongin walked into Kyungsoo’s room, expecting to find Kyungsoo in a suit with his hair gelled back, as he always was when Jongin saw him. Instead, Kyungsoo was sitting on his bed with his legs still under the covers, leaning against a pillow he had propped up against the headboard. He wore a loose grey T-shirt that dipped below his collarbones. When he looked over at Jongin, he smiled shyly—hopefully, even—and ran his fingers through his hair, still messy as though he had just woken up.

“Hi,” Kyungsoo said. He drew his knees up to his chest under the covers and hugged his legs. “Good morning.”

Jongin felt as though the air around him had turned to cement and encased him.

“I wanted—” Kyungsoo began, and then stopped. He got out of bed and walked over to his closet to get something, which he held behind his back. Jongin couldn’t stop staring at the creases on Kyungsoo’s jeans. He couldn’t breathe.

“Hi,” he said again.

Jongin nodded stiffly.

Kyungsoo’s voice softened, and, although Jongin had rarely seen any emotion on Kyungsoo’s face, he thought he could see some of the hopefulness in Kyungsoo’s expression become a little more sad. “We’ve been together for a while, Jongin.”

“Yes.” It came out as a coarse whisper, like someone had punched it out of him.

“And a while ago, I think, I told you that there was a line.” The sadness was disappearing now, turning back into hope. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I—” he laughed softly, “—I couldn’t get it out properly but, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want that line to be there anymore.”

He was quiet for a second.

“The most important thing about being a magician,” he began again, a tone of desperation slipping into his voice, “is not revealing your secrets. But I’ve shown you a lot of my magic tricks, and you know they’re not really magic.”

Jongin could see that Kyungsoo was beginning to get frustrated now. It was quiet for a few minutes, and Jongin could hear Kyungsoo’s watch ticking on his nightstand. Eventually, Kyungsoo furrowed his eyebrows and took a deep breath. He stepped towards Jongin, and the movement was startling enough that Jongin would have flinched if he weren’t locked inside the air that he felt had solidified around him. He tried to smile, and Jongin watched the smile waver on Kyungsoo’s face until he finally forced it to stay there, shy and on the brink of faltering again as Kyungsoo got down on one knee and brought a navy blue ring box out from behind his back.

“What I’m trying to say is that you’ve erased the line, Jongin, and that’s what real magic is. I don’t want that line to be there anymore. Even when I show you the secrets I keep behind the line, you don’t stop loving me, and that’s all I wanted. So,” he turned the dial in the front, and the box popped open to reveal a simple platinum wedding band. Jongin meant to breathe in sharply but the air wouldn’t go in. “Kim Jongin, will you marry me?”

Whatever had solidified around him broke. Jongin looked down at Kyungsoo and felt his chest swelling like it used to, breaking out of everything that had wore his love down to the throbbing pain that had replaced his heartbeat. He wanted so badly to say yes. Yet all he could remember was how the chains always seemed to come back tighter whenever they broke; when Kyungsoo first held his hand and he’d had to pull away, when he had gotten drunk and felt free enough to tell Kyungsoo the truth but Kyungsoo wouldn’t let him and left him breaking a wine bottle into his own hand, all the way back to when Kyungsoo had first invited Jongin to become his apprentice and then locked him up as he yearned for more of everything Kyungsoo might have to offer. In the end, he thought, still trying to open his mouth to say yes, perhaps the only thing Kyungsoo had really taught him was how to hide from what he wanted, and it would take a lifetime to undo that lesson.

“I’m sorry, Kyungsoo,” he finally said. “I can’t.”

The silence that forced itself between them was the strangest kind of quiet Jongin had ever experienced in his life. It felt like a thick barrier of jello had forced itself into Jongin’s ears so that he couldn’t hear anything. Kyungsoo was still smiling in that silence.

Just as Jongin began to force himself to leave, the bathroom door swung open. He heard glass shattering, tinkling to the floor in such a huge quantity that Kyungsoo must have torn out the whole of the mirror in the bathroom and the shower door. The ring box hit his head and fell open at his feet. From the sunlight coming in through the half-drawn curtains, he could make out their initials engraved on the inside of the band. He felt something sticky and cold in his throat. When he looked at Kyungsoo again, Kyungsoo was standing up, his face again expressionless in the way that he usually looked at Jongin, except this time he seemed to be staring through Jongin and there was just the slightest crease between his eyebrows, as though he couldn’t see Jongin there in front of him but knew he was there. Kyungsoo breathed in normally, and Jongin stared hard at his collarbones.

“Sorry for what?” Kyungsoo said, sounding as stoic as ever despite the slightly higher volume of his voice. “Sorry for what, Jongin?”

Jongin stayed quiet, still staring at Kyungsoo’s collarbones. Kyungsoo made a sound between a scoff and a laugh.

“You’re a fucking coward, you know that? We’re both fucking cowards. I admit it. But every time something has happened between us, it has been me. And every time, I’m scared out of my mind. But I sent you those tickets, and I invited you to be my apprentice, and I left that bottle of pinot noir on your nightstand, and I am the one who gets sick and tired of waiting every time and this time and tries to do something about it. But what do you do? You sit there and pity yourself until I do something and then when you fail to reciprocate you just sit there and pity yourself again. It’s despicable. Maybe I’m a coward, but at least when I decide I’m in love with someone I can be brave because of it.”

Kyungsoo paused, slightly out of breath. There was a slight shudder in the way his shoulders rose and fell as he breathed. And then quietly, voice quivering, eyes widening as he spoke like he could not believe his own words, he said, “If your love is so weak that all it does is flatter your cowardice, then I don’t want it anymore.”

The door to Kyungsoo’s room clicked open.

Jongin turned around and left, playing over and over again on a loop how the sunlight travelled around the inside of the ring when the box fell open at his feet.

Two weeks later, after they had gone their separate ways, a raven flew by his bedroom window and taped a black envelope to the glass, tapping noisily until Jongin woke up. As he approached the window, it cocked its head at him pitifully, and seemed to hesitate on whether to stay while Jongin removed the envelope from the windowpane and began to open it. A thick, cream-colored paper was folded neatly inside. He could see the creases of the gold-embossed frame on the back of the paper, and as he began to pull it out, he heard the raven’s wings flapping as it flew away.

Immediately, his glance snapped upwards. He wanted to tell the raven to wait, that he knew what was in the letter and that it was a lie, and that it should tell Kyungsoo to come back, but his lips were still stuck together from being shut for too long and the little strength that it took to open them again, he didn’t have. He wanted to sigh but the resignation was trapped, built up into a thick wad of surrender that he couldn’t cough out. Looking back down at the letter, he pulled the paper out and unfolded it carefully. Inside, there was the address of a cemetery that they had passed on the way to a performance once, and a blank death certificate with Kyungsoo’s signature on the back. On the back of the paper with the address, Kyungsoo had written, _Come visit._

It was the first and only time Jongin would allow himself to cry about loving Kyungsoo.

Later in the evening, Jongin arrived at the cemetery where the invitation had instructed him to go. Sitting on top of Kyungsoo’s tombstone was the navy blue ring box that he had proposed to Jongin with. He ran his fingers over the velvet, which was as soft as it had been when Kyungsoo had thrown it at his head after he’d said no. He traced the smooth band of gold that wrapped around the opening of the box, slowing down over the engravings of their initials on each side. Long after it had become dark and the moon had come out, Jongin finally turned the small ruby dial in the front of the box until it clicked open.

In the indent where the ring once rested, there were only ashes. Jongin wished desperately to feel something. Instead, he only felt the wind brushing his cheeks, whispering in Kyungsoo’s voice everything he had once wanted to hear but now wanted to forget.

As the wind blew, the top layer of ashes in the box blew away, leaving a dusty trail on the velvet. Jongin watched them drift upwards in the soft moonlight.

♜

Kyungsoo was never one for flowers, but Jongin leaves them at the back of the alley every week. Kyungsoo will never come back, but it’s the best apology Jongin can give.

The autumn leaves skid around on the sidewalk as Jongin steps out onto the street and starts on his way back home, when a boy’s voice calls to him from the rooftop of one of the buildings bordering the alley.

“Hey, you’re that magician, aren’t you?” The boy points at a poster across the street with one of those black and white toy wands. He tips his hat at Jongin. “You’re my favorite one.”

“Good to hear,” he says, and continues walking.

The boy leaps down from the roof and lands in front of him. He has a pretty face: a sharp jawline with a sassy looking mouth, a small nose, and big, mischievous eyes. The click of his dress shoes on the pavement remind Jongin of a deer’s hooves. His hair is dyed platinum grey, but looks a metallic silver in the sun. He pulls his hat down on his head and rests his hands on his hips. “Come on,” he says, “Teach me something. I swear I’m worth your time.”

He eyes the boy, amused. The ring hanging around the boy’s neck catches his eye when the sunlight glints off of it. As the light travels around the metal, he catches the initials engraved on the side. For a moment, he feels his heartbeat travel up to his throat before dropping into his diaphragm.

“Alright,” he says, tapping the boy’s hat and smiling. “Show me what you know.”


End file.
